“The Augmented Reality Sandbox (orginally developed by researchers at UC Davis) lets users sculpt mountains, canyons and rivers, then fill them with water or even create erupting volcanoes. This version of the device at UCLA was built by Gary Glesener using off-the-shelf parts and good ol’ playground sand. Any shape made in the sandbox is detected by an Xbox Kinect sensor and processed with open source software. It is then projected as a color-coded contour map onto the sand. Can’t get enough of this. Augmented reality is just ridiculous. These are the types of engaging technological applications we should have integrated into schools for hands-on science engagement to learn about geology, geophysics, and planetary science!”

I’ve shared the documentary, The Colors of Infinity before, but I’m sharing it again because I found it for free on YouTube, and also because I think you should watch both of these videos together simultaneously. You will zoom through the Mandelbrot set while you hear Mandelbrot himself describe his Eureka! moment of discovery. You’ll also understand what is meant by self-similarity found in fractal patterns. Experience what it’s like to magnify a fractal until it is enormously larger than our known universe!

“…the most natural thing in the world, if you find a science that you’re to some degree expert in, is speaking out about a danger to the global civilization of the human species. If you won’t, who’s going to speak out?” —Carl Sagan, Psychology Today, January 1996

I just started a six-week online course through Future Learn called Creative Coding in which we’re learning to use Processing. I can’t wait to be able to create visualizations of data and fractals like the following examples: